Management accounting education: is there a gap between academia and practitioner perceptions?

A mail survey was conducted of all Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand accredited Tertiary Education Institutions and 300 randomly selected New Zealand companies to ascertain the views of management accounting academics and practitioners on the contents of management accounting courses and the skills and competencies of recent graduates. The results show that practitioners placed an emphasis on traditional management accounting techniques, while academics placed an emphasis on contemporary techniques. Both groups were in agreement on the skills and characteristics required of recent graduates. An interesting finding was the emergence of negative comments on the arrogance of new graduates and an increased need for graduates to be work ready. These two aspects were not a feature of previous studies. The implications of the results are that academics cannot ignore the teaching of traditional management accounting techniques and may need to increase the coverage of the issues involved in implementing contemporary management accounting techniques

Parasitic suppressing circuit

A circuit for suppressing parasitic oscillations across an inductor operating in a resonant mode is described. The circuit includes a switch means and resistive means connected serially across the inductor. A unidirectional resistive-capacitive network is also connected across the inductor and to the switch means to automatically render the switch means conducting when inductive current through the inductor ceases to flow

Learning theory and its application to female learner support in engineering

School of Engineering at Murdoch University is now in its fifth year: a new School sited on the new regional Campus. This environment enabled the staff to take an innovative approach to the School's development. One key issue addressed from the outset was that of women in a nontraditional area. Positive action was taken to attract high calibre female staff and as a consequence over 50% of the School's staff, academic and non-academic, are female. From the student perspective, issues confronting females studying in Engineering, which are reflected in international low recruitment and retention, continue to be addressed. Individuals are different and these differences affect how a student performs. In particular, gender differences in learning styles have been noted. This has directed us to administer, as part of a first year foundational unit, learning style inventories to all first year students, who then identify their self-reported learning styles. In this positive atmosphere many varied and successful initiatives, based on our learning style research, are being trialled to encourage female students into our programs and then support and retain them throughout their four years of study. This research discusses the initial learning style results and their application to our initiatives

Ichthyofaunal Diversification and Distribution in Jane\u27s Creek Watershed, Randolph County, Arkansas

The purposes of this study were to determine the qualitative and quantitative distribution of fishes in the Jane\u27s Creek watershed. Jane\u27s Creek is a clear, spring-fed Ozark stream in northeastern Arkansas. A knowledge of the ichthyofauna of this stream prior to a long-range impoundment is of significance to the natural history of Arkansas. Jane\u27s Creek and its tributaries were found to be alkaline, with no measurable turbidity, and to have low levels of carbon dioxide. Dissolved oxygen values ranged from 6.1 to 16.0 ppm. Only slight differences in physicochemical conditions were noted among stations and between pool and riffle areas at each station. A total of 52 species of fishes were collected during this study. Most fishes were collected by seining. A rotenone sample on 10 July 1972 yielded a standing crop of 3,005 specimens and 392 kg/ha (2,681 specimens and 349 lb/A),minnows and darters excluded. Except for black-spot disease (Apophallus sp.) on some cyprinids, the fishes generally appeared robust. The large number of fish species collected during the sampling period reflected the diversity of habitats available. These observations indicated a healthy ichthyofaunal population inhabiting a stream system receiving little if any pollution

Temporal Variation In The Carrying Capacity Of A Perennial Grass Population

Density dependence and, therefore, K (carrying capacity, equilibrium population size) are central to understanding and predicting changes in population size (N). Although resource levels certainly fluctuate, K has almost always been treated as constant in both theoretical and empirical studies. We quantified temporal variation in K by fitting extensions of standard population dynamic models to 16 annual censuses of a population of the perennial bunch-grass Bouteloua rigidiseta. Variable-K models provided substantially better fits to the data than did models that varied the potential rate of population increase. The distribution of estimated values of K was skewed, with a long right tail (i.e., a few >jackpot> years). The population did not track K closely. Relatively slow responses to changes in K combined with large, rapid changes in K sometimes caused N to be far from K. In 13%-20% of annual intervals, K was so much larger than N that the population's dynamics were best described by geometric growth and the population was, in effect, unregulated. Explicitly incorporating temporal variation in K substantially improved the realism of models with little increase in model complexity and provided novel information about this population's dynamics. Similar methods would be applicable to many other data sets.Integrative Biolog

An EPROM-based function generator

A circuit is described to produce arbitrary time-dependent voltage functions derived from digital information stored in EPROMs. While this circuit is designed to be used as a modulator of the microwave pump source or a solid state low noise maser, it can be readily adapted for other applications

Improving Table Compression with Combinatorial Optimization

We study the problem of compressing massive tables within the partition-training paradigm introduced by Buchsbaum et al. [SODA'00], in which a table is partitioned by an off-line training procedure into disjoint intervals of columns, each of which is compressed separately by a standard, on-line compressor like gzip. We provide a new theory that unifies previous experimental observations on partitioning and heuristic observations on column permutation, all of which are used to improve compression rates. Based on the theory, we devise the first on-line training algorithms for table compression, which can be applied to individual files, not just continuously operating sources; and also a new, off-line training algorithm, based on a link to the asymmetric traveling salesman problem, which improves on prior work by rearranging columns prior to partitioning. We demonstrate these results experimentally. On various test files, the on-line algorithms provide 35-55% improvement over gzip with negligible slowdown; the off-line reordering provides up to 20% further improvement over partitioning alone. We also show that a variation of the table compression problem is MAX-SNP hard.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, 23 references. Extended abstract appears in Proc. 13th ACM-SIAM SODA, pp. 213-222, 200